Daily Archives: Wednesday, 110601

Today, while I was sleeping, my girlfriend took my phone and set the ringtone to a bloodcurdling scream. I found this out when I received a call while driving to work and, thinking someone was being murdered in my backseat, I panicked and swerved into a parked car.— FMyLife

mean… but funny… 8) (as long as it’s not happening to me)

which reminds me of a funny story…

a long time ago, when i was in college, i had come home for the break between spring and summer sessions and discovered that my parents had rented out my room, so i was forced to sleep in the family room. i didn’t spent an awful lot of time at home anyway, so it wasn’t much of a problem, but the problem came when i changed the phone-answering-machine message to a quote from a song by Crème & Godley:

This is The Bad Samaritans, hello loved-one. Sorry there was nobody here to take your call personally, but we understand what you’re going through; how you’ve travelled life’s highways with your smile on upside down. And now you think you’ve found the ultimate answer to all your problems. Don’t be hasty. Why waste a life? Wait ’till there’s a crowd down below. Give a little when you go.— Crème & Godley, The Sporting Life

everything would have been fine, except that the woman(!) to whom they had rented my room was a suicide counsellor, who had, among her clients, a couple of parents whose son had just committed suicide…

and, naturally, they called shortly after i changed the message, when nobody was home…

so a while ago i got the idea to make animations that were reciting the books of tina chopp…

i actually went so far as to create the first 6 cantos of the book of children… before xtranormal changed how things are done… i had to buy “xtranormal points” in december, so that i could finish an unfinished animation. but now it turns out that i will make no more animations at xtranormal after i run out of “points”, because they have now made it so that you have to pay to make animations.

previously, they had a few scenarios that were free, and you had to pay to make more elaborate movies – which was just fine with me – but now you have to “pay” what they’re calling “xtranormal points” in order to make any animations. it would be fine if you were able to accumulate these “xtranormal points” in less offensive ways than “convincing your friends to sign up” and that sort of thing, but they’ve actually got a way to “buy xtranormal points” with actual money, and that goes against my grain…

especially when they originally offered the service for free… 😐

not only that, but i guess they assume that people don’t really care what their animated characters look like, because they now have a bunch of “new” characters, like “chuchus” and “luchadors” and “dummies” and “presidents” and “historical figures” and “fútbol” that are very definitely not appropriate vehicles for the dissemination of profound spiritual knowledge… or something like that…

in any event, i will not be using xtranormal in the future, unless they change things again. i’m not ruling anything out, but i don’t want to have to pay for things like this.

i suppose that if i had thought about it a little bit, i could have anticipated this, but it’s still anoying. 😐